Are You Sitting Down? (6 page)

I wanted to somehow blame myself for some homose
x
ual attribute Justin had inherited from his father’s genes, but then I remembered he wasn’t of my own flesh and blood.
I still blamed myself.
It was God’s punishment from where the seed had come from, and what I’d done to get it.
If so, God conti
n
ued to scold us by what Justin
had
inherited from his mother.

The gene for cancer.

Justin had begun suffering with migraines about five years after meeting Travis.
Once Travis learned of Helen’s ba
t
tle with cancer, he urged Justin to go see a doctor.
X-rays revealed a pebble-size
d
tumor near the back of
his
head.
It was easily removed.
I drove Helen to the
Memphis
hospital to visit Justin in recovery.
He had made the nurses shave his head completely bald instead of just a patch on the back where the surgery would take place.
We joked about how much he looked like me.
He laughed, but on the inside I knew he resented that joke. We stayed three days in
Memphis
at the motel directly across the street from the hospital.
Travis had offered to put us up, but Justin said the apartment wasn’t big enough for three.

Doctors were confident the tumor was not cancerous, but there was no guarantee of remission.
Brain cancer returned
four
years later, and took our son the following summer.
Justin was too young to have made any prior plans for his death, and the cancer took him so quickly.
He refused to think of making a
r
rangements.
He had high hopes he’d make it through.

We all did.

Travis told us that Justin had once expressed interest in being cremated.
With no legal document holding us to that, Helen demanded that her son have a
“
proper burial.
”
I don’t know why I asked Travis to come along to help pick out a coffin.
Helen had already changed the burial clothes he’d picked out for Justin.
She put him in a suit.
Justin wore a tie to work, but I don’t remember ever seeing him in a suit since the day he graduated high school.

Travis
had brought
a
polo and jeans, Justin’s signature choice of attire.
Travis also picked out a m
a
hogany rosewood casket.
It was way out of our budget, but he offered to pay half.
Helen refused.
She wanted a cheaper model with sky blue inlays and shiny handles.
I sweated bullets when I wrote the check.
Travis
pulled me aside later when we’d taken Helen home.
He asked if I could take him to a bank.

“Which one?”
I asked.

“Any bank.
How about yours?
Where do you bank?”

“Citizens National.”

“Take me there,” he said.

I waited behind him in line for a teller.
I was going to sit down but he asked me to go through the line with him.
He’d already filled out
his
check and deposit slip in the car.
When we reached the teller, he pulled me in front of him and handed me the check.
It was made out to me.

“Deposit it,” he demanded.

“I can’t do that, Travis,” I said looking at him with shock when I saw the amount.
It was enough to cover the entire check I’d written at the funeral home.

“You will.
You knew that check would bounce, but you wrote it anyway even after I offered to help.
Now, Helen isn’t here and can’t stop me.
I knew you’d either
rip
it up or spend it frivolously.
That’s why we are both standing here.”

“Is there a problem?”
t
he teller asked with concern.

“I don’t have my checks with me.
I don’t know my a
c
count number,” I said throwing out excuses.

“I’m sure this nice teller can look it up for you.
Can we have a blank deposit slip please?”
Justin said.

After making the deposit, we sat in the car in front of the bank and said nothing.
I just sat behind the wheel feeling violated.
Helen never touched the accounts, but I was still afraid she’d find out.

“That was more than enough,
Travis
.”

“The rest is to cover his headstone.
Take Helen to St
u
art’s Monuments when all of this is over.”

“Are you mad about the clothes?
The casket?”

“No…” he said with a long sigh.
He’d been staring at the floorboard.
He lifted his head and looked out across the old downtown court square.
There was magic in his eyes as if he was reliving a hundred sunsets.
“Those things aren’t the Justin I know.
It’s your Justin, or at least the Justin you want to r
e
member.”

The Justin I wanted to remember had never been born.
He died in my late teenage years just before the war, with a doctor’s incision and the snip of my vasa deferentia
.
The u
n
spoken words lingered at the back of my throat.
They dried my mouth like cotton.
I stopped at Greer’s on the way home for a root beer to wash them back down.
I had never told anyone.
I ce
r
tainly couldn’t tell Travis now, although it might explain a lot
or it
might not explain anything at all.

Rather than make things more complicated, I buried those secrets with my son.
I’m not your son
, Justin called out in my head from beyond the grave.
He’d haunt me.
He’d died and gone to heaven and some angel had whispered in his ear the truth about what I’d done.
He’d come back to haunt me.
I just knew he’d cut the brak
e
s on my car on my way home from work or punch me in the chest until I had a heart attack.
I could never be so fortunate.
Having to walk this earth without him on it was my punishment.
No matter how distant he became when he was living, he was still the hope that held the Black family together.

Helen left all of
Justin’s
pictures and trophies on the wall, an everyday reminder of better days.
We crumbled, and Justin hung there on the wall to b
ear
witness to
every minute of it
.
His toothy first and second grade smiles were now like the gnas
h
ing of teeth out of anger.
In a
fit
of rage after a fistful of pills and a bottle of bourbon, Helen had more than once smashed the pictures from the wall.
She’d lay
o
n the floor in a smatter of glass with her bleeding fists and cry out.

“Why me, Lord
!
”

God wasn’t listening.

I’d stopped going to church shortly after Justin passed.
About a year later, I started back.
It was just another way to escape the confines of the house.
The congregation rarely spoke to me.
I might as well have been a demon sitting on the back pew.

I was.

The preacher
still
shook my hand every morning at the end of the sermon when we all filed out.
I always waited until everyone had passed by.
I’d gained so much weight that m
a
neuvering myself out from between the narrow pews could be quite embarrassing.

Lorraine
had stopped to say hi once.
She was the one smi
l
ing face I had left, always greeting me cordially and saying it was nice to see me.
I had not seen Travis since Justin’s f
u
neral.
I always asked
Lorraine
about him.

“He’s fine.
Travis is fine.”
That’s all she’d say.
That’s all she needed to.

A lady coughed into her hand outside as she pumped gas.
The quick white smoke of her car exhaust blew by the window, lost
against
the piles of snow.
I could hear the rotary clicks of the numbers changing on the old gas pump.
She stepped back to the driver’s seat and sat down with the car door open.
She put black mittens on and then fidgeted with a baby in a car seat in the back.
I pulled the greasy napkin bib from my shirt and crumpled it in my hand as I watche
d
her through the window.
She looked very familiar.
I’d seen her around town carrying a black man’s baby.

The pump clicked off when the tank was full.
The lady crawled back out of the car to put the nozzle back.
There was a snap of electricity when she touched the nozzle.
A whoosh of orange flame licked at her.
She screamed, breaking me from my perverted trance.
The baby in the back seat shuddered awake and joined in.

“Mr. Greer!
Mr. Greer!” I yelled.

Her immediate reacti
on was to get back in the car, e
i
ther to drive away or to get the baby out.
Some defense mechanism or rush of adrenaline stopped her from doing that.
She took off the mittens and threw them in the car.
Trying to avoid the flames, she managed to pull the nozzle out of the
tank
.
She tossed it onto the ground.
Droplets of gasoline co
n
tinued to feed the rising flame.
Luckily, there were no flames coming out of the gas tank on the car.